Toys

I visited the MoWax 21 / Urban Archaeology exhibition that opened at the Southbank Centre in London, currently home to the James Lavelle-curated Meltdown season.it was stuffed with everything you could want from a visual label retrospective with memorabilia and artwork from across the label’s history and beyond into post MW UNKLE releases.

For those familiar with the label there us much here to wallow in but plenty of behind the scenes stuff too. A letter from Mike D about a planned MoWax / Grand Royal ‘Battle of the Beats’ record, working drawings and model for Futura Pointmen toys and plenty of original art that graced many a sleeve. There are toys in every kind of colourway, some still at prototype stage, flyers reaching back to the early 90’s to when MoWax was more of a Talking Loud wannabe than the trip hop and electronica powerhouse of its heyday.

It’s free but only open until June 22nd so you only have this week to catch it before it’s gone. But if you don’t manage to make it down then there is an extensive book now available with even more info and photos. Initially funded via Kickstarter, I received a copy last week and it’s beautiful to behold, a perfect visual encapsulation of the label.

So tempted to get the ‘how-to’ build book for this version of Kaneda‘s bike from Akira made from Lego. It’s been made by The Arvo Brothers and is only available direct from them – more info over at Crunchyroll.

This wonderful piece of design is Lasstranaut, part of the Popbot Universe created by Ashley Wood and his company 3A. She’s a much talked about but seldom seen character in a world that seems to live largely in Ash’s head rather than on the printed page these days. Rumour is that she created the world of Popbot but I could have that wrong, there’s some info here and yes, she’s not wearing any pants. She’s currently up for sale on Bambaland for $200 which will also net you a book, T-shirt, poster and other goodies plus access to exclusive figures and money off all 3A products for the whole of 2014.

This blurry beast below is called Mars, a 24 inch take on the Shogun Warriors of old for a new line called World’s Best Robots. It’s modeled by a friend of mine from Ash’s designs and I’m eager to see the final paint job, just take my money why don’t you?

You know me, I love music and I love Lego. Well, a guy called Harry Heaton has started making classic (and not so classic) LP covers out of Lego. He has a tumblr full of them and is taking requests.

They’re made using Lego Digital Designer apparently which is the Lego equivalent of CAD so they’re not actually physically real but that would take a long time, a lot of money and I don’t think Lego actually make that many shades of beige. Anyway, kudos to Harry for marrying music design and Lego.

Also kudos to Harry for making a version of Bonobo’s ‘The North Borders’ LP sleeve!

Can’t wait to see the final colourway versions of this design, as Ash Wood says himself on the first fruit of his hook up with Marvel:

“I thought I would share some prototype images of our IRON MAN with you guys ( We have some nifty colorways to show you soon ) I’m having a killer time designing Marvel Universe characters, getting to play with iconic characters is pretty amazing. I still remember reading IRON MAN 200 as a kid, dreaming of being a Marvel comic artist etc, never did I think I would have a toy company and the chance to make my own! I should mention that Marvel has been nothing but supportive and hands-off, I’ll tell you that its a rare thing with such popular and well known characters! After Iron Man we have Doc Doom, Ultron and Spiderman and his Pal, actually many more, but I wanna keep some surprises!”

“He could do with some armour on his legs” was the comment from my kids on this one.

Damn! Any regular reader of this blog knows that this combines two things I dearly love. There are 5 Lego maps of the London Underground on display around the capital until the end of the summer. More details and locations over at BuzzFeed.

I absolutely love these ads from 1981, they’ve been doing the rounds on the web for some time now, I think they originate from a Lego Flickr group but I can’t find the source. Anyway, before Lego Friends designated a pink and purple world for girls only, it was resolutely unisex, and hang the cheap brown background, it was all about the bricks.

Bidding ended today on a collection of Star Wars figures on eBay, rather a LARGE collection by anyone’s standards, in fact this is supposed to be over 85% of all Star Wars figures of this scale ever produced since 1978. The collection of nearly 2,000 figures was sold for $11,500 and were donated by one-time ILM model maker Fon Davis to benefit the Rancho Obi-Wan charity.

I’ve taken these images from the eBay listing, each shelf is a large jpeg which you can zoom into by clicking. SW figures aren’t personally my thing save for a few of the older ones from my childhood but that is a collection and a half.

That’s right, a Blade Runner Police Spinner vehicle made from Lego, custom designed and completely unauthorised. It’s not big, it’s not clever and it’s certainly not cheap when they don’t pay all the postage and you have to pick up the bill. If you fancy it for Xmas then there’s the URLs to follow in the photo and they do all sorts of other vehicles from other sci-fi franchises.